Substitute by Nicholson Baker
End of Day Thirteen.
DAY FOURTEEN. Tuesday, May 6, 2014
LASSWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, SECOND GRADE
WHEN YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES AND THINK OF PEACE, WHAT DO YOU SEE?
BETH CALLED AT FIVE FORTY-FIVE to ask if I’d like to be a substitute gym teacher at Lasswell Elementary. I’d been in a deep sleep, but the word gym made my eyes snap open: sweaty children screaming and running in circles for six solid hours. “I just don’t think I’d be able to keep control of a gym class,” I said. She gave me another choice: ed tech in a second-grade class at Lasswell. Sure. After she hung up, I lay in bed next to my sleeping wife, regretting having mentioned the favela scene in Call of Duty in connection with the problems of urbanization. Maybe the reason why the teachers in the break room had acted cool toward me was because I had undisapprovingly invoked hyperviolent video games, when they blamed those very games for the boys’ inattention and wound-upedness and disrespectfulness. It was easy for me to be “cool” by making a few mildly subversive references, but they had to keep a lid on the lunacy day after day. On the other hand, what was wrong with Jerome writing an argumentative essay on why Skechers shoes were a ripoff? He was obviously smart. Why not let him run with it?
I bought a huge iced Turbo Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and checked in at Lasswell, where it was Teacher Appreciation Day. I was substituting for an ed tech named Mrs. Spahn, in Mrs. Thurston’s second-grade class. When I got to room 5, Mrs. Thurston wasn’t there. Two tiny human people were sitting at their desks. I found a chair and said hello and sat and sipped some iced coffee. One kid sneezed. “Bless you,” said the other kid. The first kid sneezed again. “Bless you again,” said the second kid. I read two posters taped to the wall. One said, “When you TEACH what you LOVE and SHARE what you KNOW you open EYES, MINDS, HEARTS and SOULS to UNEXPLORED WORLDS.” The other held a quotation from somebody named Todd Whitaker: “The best thing about being a teacher is that it matters. The hardest thing about being a teacher is that it matters every day.”
Mrs. Thurston arrived and said, “Are you Mrs. Spahn today?” She had on a high-waisted linen dress and her hair was pulled back into a black braid with a pencil poked into it. She went over the day’s schedule with me and gave me Mrs. Spahn’s folder. “She usually hangs out back here,” she said. “Percy, Tyler, and Curtis are the three kids she works with in here.”
“Thanks so much,” I said. She wrote my name on the board. I read the sheet about Percy. It said, “At the main entrance, watch for a dark green van. This is Percy’s transportation to and from school. You will need to go out and get him and walk him to Classroom No. 3, Mrs. Thurston.”
A bell rang. I said, “I think I have to go out and meet him, right?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Thurston. Jeez, she could have told me. I hustled around the library toward the front entrance.
“Hi, Mr. Baker,” said Cerise, the plump second-grader from Mrs. Heber’s class.
“Hi, good to see you,” I said.
Kids poured in through the front door.
“WALKING! WALKING! WALKING!” yelled a teacher.
At the end of the row of yellow buses, which were idling and puffing air from their air brakes, was a green van. The sliding door opened and a small boy got out. He was a good-looking, alert boy in a green shirt and black sneakers.
“Hey, Percy, how are you?” I said.
“Good.”
“How long have you been coming to this school?” I asked.
“Since kindergarten,” Percy said. We walked to class. He put away his backpack and sat down. “My mom hurt her arm on a pillow,” he said.
“How’d that happen?”
“I have no idea. A pillow!”
I skimmed the sub sheet. “So you know how to do all this?” I said. “You need to get your sunglasses, headphones, snack bag, lunch bag.”
“I have most things in my backpack,” said Percy. He handed me a sheet of paper called a “Communication Log.” I was supposed to note things down on it for Percy’s parents.
“Are you Mr. Baker?” said Tyler. He was a little blond bony kid with a big smiley mouth.
I said I was.
“There’s only one girl here, and the rest are boys,” he said. “See, one, two, three, four boys, and you.”
“I’m a boy,” I said.
As more students arrived, he counted them.
Finally Mrs. Thurston looked up. “Okay, Tyler! You have morning work to do. Not wandering about. You all have morning work to do.”
Tyler pulled out a spelling crossword puzzle. “Can you help me with this?” he asked me.
“Sure, let’s take a look.” I asked him whether he liked to go across or down.
“I’ll go downwards,” he said. He read the first word of the clue, which was the. “Three,” he said, counting the number of letters in the.
I explained that you didn’t have to count the number of letters in the words of the clue, you had to count the number of boxes for letters for that bit of the puzzle. There were six letters.
“Three,” he said, counting the letters of the again. “One, two, three.” I explained it again, and read the clue for him. “The second day of the week.” We both got confused about what the first day of the week was and tried Tuesday. But the sentence made it clear: After a great weekend, it is hard to go back to school on ______. Sunday was the first day of the whole week, and so they wanted Monday. Tyler wrote the word down in the square boxes, as I prompted him with letter sounds. When he was done, he laboriously wrote Monday again on the blank line, with light darting marks of his pencil. “We don’t want to let anything be blank,” he said.
I asked him if people called him Ty.
“Tyler,” he said. “But I usually call me Ty.”
We read the next clue. Past tense of the verb “to find.” Zach ______ James’s glasses on the shelf. Tyler was stumped. For shelf he read shirt. Past tense meant it happened a little while ago, I said. “You know the word find, like you find a candy on the floor?”
“Yeah.”
“What if you found a candy on the floor yesterday? How would you say it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d say ‘I found a candy on the floor,’ wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah!” He wrote the letters in the boxes, with help from me.
“Now I get it,” Tyler said. He checked off clue number two, and tried to read four-down. “What—” he said. He coughed. He had a cold. “What something is called,” he read. “What is your—? Name!”
“You got it right off,” I said. “First try.”
“Now I need six.”
“Right—six-across,” I whispered.
“And it starts with an E and it ends with a Y.”
“Exactly, that’s how it works.”
Six-across was Including all. The teacher gave a cupcake to ______ child. Tyler coughed again and snuffled and wiped his nose with his sleeve. This was a tough one and he couldn’t get it until I mimed every in the sentence. Then he forgot the R when he spelled it.
A three-note doorbell bong came on the PA system, and some children incomprehensibly chanted a greeting, a weather summary, and the lunch menu. They closed with a joke. “What did the egg say to the clown? You crack me up.”
Tyler wrote yellow in the crossword puzzle.
Mrs. Thurston came by and pointed out to us that all the words in the puzzle were up on one of the whiteboards. “They’re all right there,” she said.
“We’ve been flying blind,” I said. “That helps.”
Mrs. Thurston put her hand on her heart. The class rose. We all pledged.
Percy came over, holding his worksheet. “Ta-daa!” he said. He was finished.
“Sir, nice job!” I said.
The students in the class next door sang “God Bless America.”
A boy came up and said he was Curtis. My third kid. I asked him if he’d done the crossword puzzle.
“No. I didn’t get time.”
I asked Tyler what he was supposed to do now.
“I’ve got to get ready to go somewhere else,” he said. He grabbed a binder and left.
I asked Curtis what he’d been up to.
“My dad’s buying a new car,” he said. “We’re going to go camping and he got a car to sleep in. We’re going to go gold-panning.”
“You’re going to search for gold?” I whispered. I didn’t want to disturb the rest of the class.
“Yeah, the campsite we’re going to has a place where you can go panning for gold.”
“Amazing.”
Mrs. Thurston was doing the rounds. “Andrew, you should be done by now. It’s time to be done.”
She gathered many of the students around her to talk to them about how to write a letter. Dear and deer were homophones, she told them. “There’s a lot of chattering in the room,” she warned. “What are you supposed to be doing when you’re sitting on the floor?” She scolded a girl with a bad cough named Marnie. Then she said, “It’s time to get ready for round one, please. Round one. BRITNEY!”
She gave me a stack of parent handouts to put into each student’s cubby. “Marnie,” she said. “I’m not sure why you’re hanging out right there with that group. Please choose your spot and get started. Corey, you’re not to be anywhere near Adrian all day.” Ah, but Corey wanted to be near Adrian, who was wearing white corduroy pants and a red T-shirt. Mrs. Thurston raised her voice. “Corey, you now owe me a gem! You should be working right now, reading from your book bucket. If you are reading to self, you are not shopping for any more books, and I already gave you the directions for not being anywhere near Adrian. That’s enough.”
She began a grammar lesson in nouns and pronouns and verbs and adjectives, subjects and predicates. They had to underline parts of speech with different-colored pencils. Adrian, who wasn’t on the floor with the more advanced students, asked if he could work out in the hall. I said I didn’t know, it was up to Mrs. Thurston. “She says we can,” said Adrian.
“Let me just check, because I’m a sub,” I said. I whisper-asked Mrs. Thurston if Adrian could work in the hall. She said, “Adrian, you do not need to work out in the hall, we have plenty of space in here.”
Percy said he needed to sharpen a pencil. I handed him a sharp pencil from a cup.
“I only use one kind,” said Percy. “That’s how I am.” He sharpened his pencil, which had a special rubber grip on it.
“What about the rest of the stuff that you’re supposed to take out of your backpack—the vest, the thermos, all that?”
“The vest should be in there,” he said.
“Okay, if you know what’s happening, that’s good,” I said. “So you finished that whole crossword puzzle?”
“Yeah.”
“Find the noun,” said Mrs. Thurston, across the room. “What is the noun?”
“Spider?”
“Why don’t you underline the rest of the nouns. I want to see if you can do it on your own.” Mrs. Thurston looked up. “Britney and Grace. You should be in your own space, please, and working quietly. Evan! I should not hear you talking.”
“I wasn’t talking, she was talking!”
“Coral, go find a different spot to work. Coral!” She explained to a smart girl, Ariel, that these, as in “these animals,” was a pronoun used as an adjective. “It’s showing you which kind of animals,” she said. “So the adjectives are still part of the subject. If you said, ‘The animal has five eyes,’ the five would still be an adjective, because it’s telling you how many eyes.”
Ariel said, “If I said, ‘A animal has five eyes—’”
“I’m hearing some chatting around the room!” Mrs. Thurston said in her admonitory voice.
“Are we ready for our quiz?” asked Ariel.
“I want you to read it through one quick time,” Mrs. Thurston said, “and then I’m going to give you the quiz.”
“YEE,” said a smart boy, Stuart.
“Stuart loves quizzes,” said Ariel. “Right, Stuart?”
“I love roller coasters.”
“I’ve never, ever been on a roller coaster,” said Ariel.
“You’ve never been on a roller coaster? I’ve been on an upside-down one,” said Stuart.
“You’re crazy. Hey, you want to know something? In a month and a half, I’m going to Disneyland. Well, Disney World.”
Mrs. Thurston focused on Reed. “Have you finished reading the book?”
“No.”
“You’ve got to read it through before you take the quiz. You’re not following directions, there, Reed.” Thirty seconds passed. “Reed! I’m watching your mouth move!”
Some of the kids could work just fine on their own, and some could not.
“Corey, if you’re reading to self, I should see you with a book the whole time,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Not looking around. Reading it.”
Marnie’s cough was bad. Mrs. Thurston gave some special help to some of the more with-it students. “Why do you think the author wrote this book?” she asked. “What was he trying to do?”
“He wrote it so people will learn about animals?” said Ariel.
“Most people don’t know about the praying mantis,” said Stuart.
“That’s called inform. The author is trying to inform you about something. They’re teaching you about it. The other thing that he could be doing is to entertain. So when you read a story like this one—” She pulled up Buzz Said the Bee. “Emmet, you should be looking at me and paying attention. I’m telling you something. This one’s for entertaining.”
“Can we read that one?”
“I’ve already read it,” said Stuart.
“So with a book, it could be to entertain—you’re just having fun. It could be to inform you, so that you learn about something. Or it could be to persuade you. The writing we had you do on Friday, telling me about what your favorite season was, was trying to convince me. Why is that season your favorite? You’re trying to get me to change my mind.” She handed out the quizzes and scanned the class. “I still hear some chatting in the corner over there,” she said. Then, louder, “Marnie! You are not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. You’ll be spending some recess time reading, because you’re not getting stuff done like you’re supposed to be. You should have been reading this whole time. It was fine that you went and got a library book, but you’re supposed to be reading it.”
Curtis, who was very small and quiet, with rolled-up jeans on, came up and said, “Excuse me? Whenever I close my eyes, it hurts really bad. Whenever I close my eyes.” He squinted his eyes shut for a while and then opened them.
I whispered, “Maybe you should just hold them open.”
“I’ve just been trying to keep them closed.” He sat down and resumed reading his book.
“Time to clean up soon,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Marnie, what are you supposed to be doing? Get going right away. You’re finishing up how you care for your dog.”
Two girls gathered the colored pencils. “There’s markers in here!” said one loudly.
“Girls!” said Mrs. Thurston.
“I know, but there’s markers in here.”
“Without talking,” said Mrs. Thurston. “You’re interrupting the entire rest of the class with it.”
Percy was searching all over for a book. “I have to read it by tomorrow,” he said. He found it in his desk: A Book About Your Skeleton, by Ruth Belov Gross. Now half the kids were reading softly aloud to a partner. Mrs. Thurston explained the two pronunciations of bow, as in “bow and arrow” and “take a bow.” A
Percy finished the skeleton book.
“You seem to be a fast reader,” I said. “How did you learn?”
“Practice,” he said. “I’ve just been reading a lot.”
“Am I supposed to remind you to drink from your thermos?”
“Oh.” He poured something into his thermos cup and drank it. Mrs. Spahn’s sub plans said, “Prompt him to drink his water and tea. His thermos schedule is: First thermos finished by 11:00; second thermos finished by 1:00, and third thermos finished by 2:45.”
Percy showed me a picture of a skeleton wearing a red baseball hat. It had red and yellow arm bones and green finger bones. We counted the number of bones that are in one hand. “How many bones are in your body?” I wondered. “A hundred?”
“Two hundred and six,” Percy said. “It’s in the back.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I think I’m going to read the book again, because we’re going to do a quiz tomorrow. So I might want to read it again. I’m not that good at remembering the first time. I’m not a good rememberer.”
“You seem pretty good,” I said.
“I can remember things for, like, ten minutes. But after that I have a hard time remembering.”
I asked him why that was.
“Maybe because I’m always thinking of a lot of other stuff? Like hundreds.”
“What’s in your thermos?”
“Water. That’s my favorite drink. Tea’s my second, and orange juice third. Soda I do not even like. Throw it away. Apparently I do not like weird food.”
“So you like, say, a very simple cheese sandwich?”
He shook his head. “And I do not like cheeseburgers.”
What did he like?
“Mm, chicken. Or pizza.”
He read me a page of the skeleton book, which was nicely illustrated. “Everyone has bones,” he read. “If you didn’t have any bones, you would flop around like spaghetti.”
“Wow, you’re quite a good reader,” I said. “You don’t mess around.”